BACTERIOLOGY AND THE WAR. 5 
resemble exactly that grown from the human being. There 
are other highly technical reasons. 
The most important link in the whole chain of evidence 
is the production of the disease by inoculation of animals. 
For without this proof it is dificult or impossible to establish 
the fact that a particular germ is the cause of a particular 
disease. This is partly because it is unlawful to seek the truth, 
and try and save life by experiments upon human beings, 
even criminals condemned to death, though it is lawful to 
destroy life by blowing human beings to smithereens with 
shot and shell, and hackimg them to pieces with swords and 
bayonets. 
Bacteriologists have saved millions of lives by showing 
how certain diseases are spread, what precautions may be 
taken to prevent their spread, and how in some cases they 
may be cured. Bacteriologists will probably in the future 
entirely abolish many infectious diseases, but bacteriology 
applied to medicine and surgery is very largely based upon 
animal experiment. It is true they are not “ vivisected ” 
in the ordinary public acceptation of the term, there is usually 
no cutting, no necessity for an anaesthetic, but only the 
injection of cultures and other materials with hypodermic 
needles. 
One reason why the germs of scarlet fever, measles, 
mumps and typhus have not been discovered, is because 
these diseases cannot apparently be produced in animals. 
Within the last five years the microbe of whooping cough 
is said to have been discovered, but we are not sure whether 
the true microbe has been found, because the cultures have 
no effect when injected into any of the lower animals with 
the exception of the monkey. Bacteriologists are not certain 
yet, whether the disease which the monkey develops after these 
injections is whooping cough or not. 
